Bar Exam Structure.....

The thing is that there are no official answers for Bar exam questions. The questions are concocted in the minds of professors and other non-practicing individuals. The official answers, or "checklists," are derived by taking a random sampling from all answers on the exam. The Bar then uses a series of meetings to use mathematical models to formulate an ESTIMATE what the best answers should be. These meetings are called CALLIBRATION SESSIONS. It is this calibration that the Committee uses to control the answers of the exam.

Oh please, ela, stop it! That's ridiculous!

I was talking to one of my neighbors today about the Arkansas doctor injured by a car bomb and he was like, it was done in revenge by someone who not certified by him as Chairman of the Medical Board. Now that sounded hilarious to me! Up to now nothing has been clarified:

An investigator at the home of Dr. Trent P. Pierce, chairman of the Arkansas State Medical Board, after the blast Wednesday.

By LIZ ROBBINSPublished: February 4, 2009

A bomb exploded Wednesday morning in the driveway of the chairman of the Arkansas medical board in West Memphis, Ark., critically injuring him, the authorities said. The chairman, Trent P. Pierce, 54, a family practice physician, was taken by air to the Regional Medical Center in Memphis, just across the Mississippi River, where a hospital spokeswoman said he was in critical condition Wednesday evening. "We just don’t know why someone would do this," the police chief, Robert Paudert, told reporters who had gathered down the street from Dr. Pierce's house. "We don't know if it was a random act, or someone specifically targeted him." Chief Paudert said Wednesday evening that officials had no suspects, but that the local authorities were waiting for the ATF to conclude its investigation at the scene. Dr. Pierce underwent surgery to remove metal debris from his abdomen and to repair damage to his eyes and his face, said a close friend and neighbor, Scott Ferguson, who is also a physician. Dr. Ferguson, who was with the family at the hospital in Memphis, spoke with Dr. Pierce's trauma team, including the ophthalmologist, Dr. Chris Fleming.

"Dr. Fleming says there is severe trauma to the left eye but the right eye is intact," Dr. Ferguson said. He added that Dr. Pierce had suffered burns on his hands, face and legs. "His heart is good, there is no brain injury, and that's very encouraging," Dr. Ferguson said. It was not clear whether the bomb was in the driveway or inside the doctor's car, a white Lexus hybrid sport-utility vehicle. Chief Paudert said investigators were not sure whether Dr. Pierce was inside the car when the bomb detonated. The explosion, which happened around 8 a.m., was heard as far away as a mile, the police chief said. Chief Paudert said Dr. Pierce, who is well known and respected in the area, was not known to be involved in any legal or other disputes, and did not perform abortions in his practice. Dr. Ferguson confirmed that. The police chief, who said Dr. Pierce was his personal physician, said the doctor was the only person injured in the blast.

Drew Wade, a spokesman for the firearms bureau in Washington, said 18 special agents from three states were working on the case in cooperation with the F.B.I. and the local police. A neighbor on North Avalon Street in the upper-income neighborhood where Dr. Pierce lives described hearing the blast. "I heard a strong explosion, and then a lighter one right after that," the neighbor, Hollis Gibbs, said in an interview. "I thought it was a transformer, or that gas had built up in the house and exploded." William Trice, a lawyer for the medical board, described Dr. Pierce in an interview as "a very mild-mannered, well-educated, caring doctor." "He's also been a very good chairman, and cares about the people of Arkansas," Mr. Trice added. "He has always upheld the highest standards of care." Dr. Pierce was appointed to the board in 1997 by Mike Huckabee, the governor at the time, and he was reappointed in 2005. His term expires in 2012.

The state medical board supervises licenses of health care professionals and can suspend or revoke licenses. The Associated Press reported that Dr. Pierce had been scheduled to travel to Little Rock on Wednesday afternoon to attend board subcommittee meetings. Mr. Trice said that while the medical board sometimes had to make difficult decisions about the licensing of physicians, he was unaware of any current controversies involving the board or Dr. Pierce. "I doubt seriously if any recent board decisions had anything to do with this," Mr. Trice said. "The chairman usually doesn't vote, except to break a tie," he said, adding that he could recall no such votes in recent years.

President-elect Barack Obama on Monday announced Sen. Hillary Clinton as his pick for secretary of state, calling her an "American of tremendous stature who will have my complete confidence."

"Hillary's appointment is a sign to friend and foe of the seriousness of my commitment to renew American diplomacy and restore our alliances," Obama said at a news conference in Chicago, Illinois. "I have no doubt that Hillary Clinton is the right person to lead our State Department and to work with me in tackling this ambitious foreign policy agenda."

[...]

"Mr. President-elect, I am proud to join you on what will be a difficult and exciting adventure in this new century," she said at the news conference. Clinton's husband, former President Bill Clinton, who was not at the event Monday, issued a statement expressing his support for his wife. "In her service to the people of New York and our nation, Hillary has demonstrated the knowledge, passion, resilience, and capacity to learn that our country needs at this critical time. "She loves being a senator from New York, but as she has in all the 37 years I've known her, she answered the call to serve. I commend President-Elect Obama for asking her to be a part of a great national security team. America will be well-served," he said in a statement.

"New York will lose a powerful voice in the Senate. But the nation will gain a powerful voice in the world. Sen. Clinton's wisdom and record of leadership will make her a strong advocate for the cause of liberty, human rights, and the rule of law," he said in a written statement. In assuming this new post, Clinton will have some control of her staffing, like picking the assistant secretaries, according to sources familiar with the negotiations. [...] Asked Monday how he can be sure that his administration will function as a team of rivals and not a clash of rivals, Obama said he has assembled a group of "outstanding public servants" who share a core vision for the country.

[...] As for Clinton, some observers have raised concerns about her husband and suggested that the former president's international business dealings, global foundation and penchant for going off script could present a significant obstacle for the incoming commander-in-chief. "These are issues that I'm sure are being discussed, and they will have to be worked out, and it's legitimate to ask these questions," said James Carville, a former aide to the Clintons and CNN contributor. Obama's transition team was given access to Bill Clinton's finances and post-presidential dealings, sources said. As part of the early vetting process, the team looked for any negative information that could jeopardize the prospect of Hillary Clinton as secretary of state.

A particular issue of concern, observers said, was the donor list of Bill Clinton's global foundation, which might show connections to international figures who push policies that could conflict with those of the new Obama administration. Since exiting the Oval Office eight years ago, Clinton has reportedly raised more than $500 million for the foundation, a significant portion of which financed the construction of his presidential library. The foundation has also doled out millions for AIDS relief in Africa and other charitable causes around the world. Amid repeated criticism from Sen. Clinton's primary opponents, Bill Clinton would not reveal the extent of the foundation's donor list earlier this year. [...]

Life as Secretary of State is a carrousal, says Hillary Clinton, who wants to get off of the international merry-go-round — in 18 months, which happens to coincide with the end of President Barack Obama's first term. She still finds her work fascinating, but her nation-hopping and other duties leave her "perpetually tired" and she yearns to settle down, too, she told a BBC interviewer Thursday.

But she also sees a life beyond the global horizon, saying, "I think that I am a pretty normal, average person, despite all of the hype. And I am very interested in spending time with my friends and my family and not being on the merry-go-round all the time."

That brings up an issue no woman wants to hear from friends, Clinton notes with a chuckle. "My friends call and email saying, 'Oh, my gosh, I saw you on television. You looked so tired.' Which I send back saying, 'Gee, thanks a lot.' But I know, because if you work around the clock like we do, that's just inevitable. So I do try to take some time, long weekends, take some deep breathing. I do exercise, yoga, those kinds of things. But no, I'm never tired about the work. It's just the physical challenge."

"I was just walking through the mall here and had some young women come up and shout at me and tell me how much they appreciated me. And I think for young women and not so young women, there is a connection. They know that I've spent a lot of time working on women's issues and they care about what I'm doing and what it might mean for them."

On January 28, 1986, the space shuttle Challenger exploded seconds after launching. Seven astronauts, including a civilian schoolteacher, perished in a fireball of smoke and flames. The decision had been made to go ahead with the launch despite a near disaster on an earlier Challenger flight and despite strenuous objections and warnings from knowledgeable engineers about the defective O-rings at the joints of the booster rockets. Were key NASA administrators ignorant of the danger or cavalier about the lives of the astronauts? I doubt it.

NASA had already conducted 2-dozen successful launches with essentially the same equipment. With their confidence boosted by previous successes, administrators were oriented toward a "go" decision. Second, NASA officials, like the general public, were caught up in the enthusiasm surrounding the launching of the first civilian (schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe) into space. Further, there were additional, practical reasons for NASA people to be victimized by their own wishful thinking: given NASA's need to secure congressional funding by displaying its efficiency and productivity, with the intense public interest in the "teacher in space" program and its wish to demonstrate its technological capabilities, lift-off was a more desirable decision than delay. Any mention of possible system failure would have suggested a need to spend more money, a conclusion NASA found distasteful in light of its commitment to cost-effectiveness and economy.

Unlike NASA administrators, engineers at Morton Thiokol (the company that manufactured the solid rocket boosters) were not concerned about the political, economic, and public relations implications of a decision on whether or not to launch. All they cared about was whether or not the damn thing would work - and given the subfreezing temperatures at the launch site, they objected strenuously to the launch. But the top execs at Morton were not so fortunate. For them, more was at stake than a successful launch. They were in great conflict. On the one hand, as engineers, they were sensitive to the opinions of their fellow engineers. On the other hand, as execs, they were dependent on NASA for a contract worth approximately $400 million per year. Thus, in part, they tended to identify with the same concerns that NASA administrators did. Robert Lund, Thiokol's vice president for engineering, at first opposed the launch but changed his position after he was advised to "take off his engineering hat and put on one representing management." How did Morton execs such as Lund deal with this conflict? Before their last conference with NASA administrators, they polled Thiokol employees but not the engineers - only other management personnel, who voted to "go" with the launch. Thus, in a conference between NASA officials and Thiokol execs the night before the fateful launch, participants reinforced one another's commitment to proceed.

I can't believe this country would appropriate a h e l l of a lot of money to an agency like NASA! Just imagine if all that money were used to better the lives of people on this planet, or this country, if you like! How much less misery would be?!

It's not that they don't get it, it's because they want the resources to be distributed disproportionately among people, that they go ahead and throw money to the toilet! It would be far too dangerous for the people in power to have the standard of living of the people they oppress raised even a little bit; because the latter would be able to think a bit more as to what it is that keeps them oppressed, poor and hungry! Question the very ideology that keeps the oppressors in power!

Incitatus says the money appropriated to NASA is basically thrown to the trash can (pressing on the alternative social, practical uses of the money) - now to me that means living like an animal, just satisfying the basic needs, without having to sorta figure out where we are, where do we live, where do we come from, and where do we go .. are there any other civilizations like ours (regardless of the fact that may or may not be friendly towards us - with our curiosity having the potential to backfire, par exemple)

I mean, think about it, it's much more comforting to think we know where do we stand, what our planet Earth is, and yes - how small/unimportant compared to the whole of the Universe!

In fact - it is such - that should hopefully cut our egos down to size, for us not to treat each other like one guy were god and the other one just a Dog out there! Makes us understand that we all "belong," share the same characteristics, ultimate fate, and the like!

Life as Secretary of State is a carrousal, says Hillary Clinton, who wants to get off of the international merry-go-round — in 18 months, which happens to coincide with the end of President Barack Obama's first term. She still finds her work fascinating, but her nation-hopping and other duties leave her "perpetually tired" and she yearns to settle down, too, she told a BBC interviewer Thursday.

But she also sees a life beyond the global horizon, saying, "I think that I am a pretty normal, average person, despite all of the hype. And I am very interested in spending time with my friends and my family and not being on the merry-go-round all the time."

That brings up an issue no woman wants to hear from friends, Clinton notes with a chuckle. "My friends call and email saying, 'Oh, my gosh, I saw you on television. You looked so tired.' Which I send back saying, 'Gee, thanks a lot.' But I know, because if you work around the clock like we do, that's just inevitable. So I do try to take some time, long weekends, take some deep breathing. I do exercise, yoga, those kinds of things. But no, I'm never tired about the work. It's just the physical challenge."

"I was just walking through the mall here and had some young women come up and shout at me and tell me how much they appreciated me. And I think for young women and not so young women, there is a connection. They know that I've spent a lot of time working on women's issues and they care about what I'm doing and what it might mean for them."

I'm sure she doesn't regret taking the job up - I mean, with prospects to become US president being deem in 2012 - what else could she have done, desiring, as she appeared to, to continue to be politically active?

But she also sees a life beyond the global horizon, saying, "I think that I am a pretty normal, average person, despite all of the hype. And I am very interested in spending time with my friends and my family and not being on the merry-go-round all the time."

That brings up an issue no woman wants to hear from friends, Clinton notes with a chuckle. "My friends call and email saying, 'Oh, my gosh, I saw you on television. You looked so tired.' Which I send back saying, 'Gee, thanks a lot.' But I know, because if you work around the clock like we do, that's just inevitable. So I do try to take some time, long weekends, take some deep breathing. I do exercise, yoga, those kinds of things. But no, I'm never tired about the work. It's just the physical challenge."

"I was just walking through the mall here and had some young women come up and shout at me and tell me how much they appreciated me. And I think for young women and not so young women, there is a connection. They know that I've spent a lot of time working on women's issues and they care about what I'm doing and what it might mean for them."

No doubt she could have chosen to not take the job up - that it was her own decision to become SOS for the Obama administration.

I tend to think she wanted to make some kind of statement in politics as a woman, before it was too late. She could not become the first woman President, but at least she would not be remembered just as the First Lady during the husband days.

Will you walk, the CD Theory is all too complex to fully explain it here - I'd focus instead on the practical applications of the Dissonance Theory. That's because one of the reasons it has inspired much research is its ability to explain phenomena not readily explainable by common sense. For instance, dissonance theory has been used as a way to understand events that totally confound our imagination - like the enormous power certain cult leaders like Jim Jones, David Koresh, and Marshall Herff Applewhite have had over the hearts and minds of their followers.

Take for instance Jim Jones. It goes without saying that the massacre at Jonestown was tragic in the extreme. It is beyond comprehension that a single person could make hundreds of people kill themselves and their own children.

"Jim" Jones was the founder and leader of the "Peoples Temple," best known for the Nov 18, 1978 mass suicide of 909 Temple members in Jonestown, Guyana, along with the killings of 5 other people at a nearby airstrip. Over 200 children were murdered at Jonestown, almost all of whom were forcefully made to ingest cyanide by the elite Temple members. Jones was born in Indiana and started the Temple in that state in the 1950s. Jones and the Temple later moved to California, and both gained notoriety with the move of the Temple's headquarters to San Francisco in the mid-1970s. The incident in Guyana ranks among the largest mass suicides in history, and was the single greatest loss of American civilian life in a non-natural disaster until the events of Sep 11, 2001.

Now you may have heard about the all-too-familiar technique of the foot-in-the-door. Escalation is perpetuating. Once a small commitment is made, it sets the stage for ever-increasing commitments. The behavior needs to be justified, so attitudes are changed; this change in attitudes influences future decisions and behavior. Suppose you would like to enlist someone's aid in a massive undertaking, but you know the job you have in mind for the person is so difficult, and will require so much time and effort, that the person will surely decline. What do you do? You may get the person involved in much smaller aspects of the job, ones so easy that s/he wouldn't dream of turning down. Such serves to commit the individual to the "cause." Once people are thus committed, the likelihood of their complying with the larger request increases.

Jim Jones extracted great trust from his followers one step at a time. There was a chain of ever-increasing commitments on the part of his followers. Once a small commitment is made, the stage is set for ever-increasing commitments. It's easy to understand how a charismatic leader like Jones might extract money from his church's members. Once they have committed themselves to donating a small amount in response to his message of peace and universal brotherhood, he's able to request and receive a great deal more. Next, he induces people to sell their homes and turn over the money to the church. Soon, at his request, several of his followers pull up stakes, leaving their families and friends, to start life anew in the strange and difficult environment of Guyana. There, not only do they work hard (thus increasing their commitment), but they also are cut off from potential dissenting opinion, inasmuch as they are surrounded by true believers.

Jones takes sexual liberties with several married women among his followers, who acquiesce, but reluctantly; Jones claims to be the father of their children. He had sexual relations with his men followers as well, and made them believe they were all homosexuals, while he was the only heterosexual. Finally, as a prelude to the climactic event, Jones induces his followers to perform a series of mock ritual suicides as a test of their loyalty and obedience. Thus, in a step-by-step fashion, the commitment to Jones increases. Each step in itself is not a huge, ludicrous leap from the one preceding it.

linoleum - this guy must have really been something - I mean, looks like he's using a "method" where every prior little commitment made on the part of his followers, also serves as an actual "buffer" to any subsequent and still-persisting resistance to the irrational actions he eventually orders his followers to do.

Following on from Bion's experiences in groups, Elliott Jaques and Isabel Menzies Lyth conducted research in various organizations and found the same mechanisms at work, with the defences embodied in the mores and structures of the institutions. I believe that this model is at work in innumerable situations -- neighborhood gang, school, workplace, country club, religion, racial, political and international conflict. When one comes into contact with the group, subculture or institution, the psychic price of admission is to enter into that group's splits and projective identifications.

In her classical paper on "The Function of Social Systems as a Defence Against Anxiety," Menzies Lyth describes the link as it applies to student nurses: "[...] I have used the term "social defence system" as a construct to describe certain features of the nursing service as a continuing social institution, I wish to make it clear that I do not imply that the nursing service as an institution operates the defences. Defences are, and can be, operated only by individuals. Their behavior is the link between their psychic defences and the institution'. There is a complex and subtle interaction, resulting in a matching between the individual's defences and the institution's. The processes 'depend heavily on repeated projection of the psychic defence system into the social defence system and repeated introjection of the social defence system into the psychic defence system. This allows continuous testing of the match and fit as the individual experiences his own and other people's reactions.

'The social defence system of the nursing service has been described as a historical development through collusive interaction between individuals to project and reify relevant elements of their psychic defence systems. However, from the viewpoint of the new entrant to the nursing service, the social defence system at the time of entry is a datum, an aspect of external reality to which she must react and adapt. Fenichel [...] states that social institutions arise through the efforts of human beings to satisfy their needs, but that social institutions then become external realities comparatively independent of individuals which affect the structure of the individual. The student nurse has to adapt her defences to those of the institution.

The latter are relatively immutable, so she shapes hers until they are congruent with the institution's. [...] Thus, the individual cannot bring the content of the phantasy anxiety situations into effective contact with reality. Unrealistic or pathological anxiety cannot be differentiated from realistic anxiety arising from real dangers. Therefore, anxiety tends to remain permanently at a level determined more by the phantasies than by the reality. The forced introjection of the hospital defence system, therefore, perpetuates in the individual a considerable degree of pathological anxiety.

[...] Crucial to understand how a person comes to think and feel like a racist or a virulent nationalist or a member of a street gang or a religious or psychoanalytic sect. The mechanisms are the same and that the process of taking in the values as 'a given', adapting one's own primitive anxieties to that group's particular version of splitting, projection, stereotyping and scapegoating, leads to the same kind of impoverishment that nurses experience -- of the ability to think and feel with moderation and to deal with reality and anxiety.

It is projected into the structure or the Other and given back -- not detoxified, but -- as an injunction to behave inhumanely toward patients, Lacanians, Jews, Armenians, 'the Evil Empire' or whomsoever. It is by this means that we became certain, without thinking about it or meeting many, if any, of the people involved, that Germans are sadistic, Japanese cunning, Italians sexist, Mexicans lazy, French romantic, English decent, Scots dour, Canadians boring, Swiss efficient, Dutch tidy, Scandinavians cold, Spaniards romantic, Russians passionate, Turks depraved, Arabs fanatical, Jews avaricious, Hawaiians friendly, Australians gauche, Chinese inscrutable, Africans rhythmic, White South Africans racist and authoritarian. We have been sure of all these things all our conscious lives, but we do not recall learning any of them.

We are dealing with a whole new level of grip. It's done with superglue -- cemented or bonded with the most primitive level of feeling that we have. [...] Members do it with projective identification.' Members of families, couples, groups, institutions, tribes, cultures and so on. [...] What is true of worms served up as food for birds is also true of people with respect to prejudices and other deeply held beliefs. They become so deeply implanted or sedimented that they are 'second nature'. [...] First we project our destructiveness into others; then we wish to annihilate them without guilt because they contain all the evil and destructiveness. When we read accounts of the genocide of the Conquistadors, the Stalinists, the Germans, the Kampucheans, the Americans or the Iraqis, we must ask what has been projected into these people from the most primitive parts of their tormentors. [...]

[...] What is being a fan of a movie star or a groupie of a rock star other than romantic, idealizing projective identification? Where positive aspects of the self are forcefully projected similar degrees of depersonalization occur, with feelings of personal worthlessness and with dependent worship of the other's contrasting strengths, powers, uncanny sensitivity, marvellous gifts, thoughts, knowledge, undying goodness etc. This is the world of the devotee, cults and hero-promotion.

It is also a world in which people will do anything a Bagwan or a Rev. James Jones tells them to do -- from sexual license to mass suicide. The same suspension of one's own sense of right and wrong is at work in the followers L. Ron Hubbard in the Church of Scientology as in the minds of the devotees of Charles Manson, killing rich Californians, and in the convictions of bombers and perpetrators of sectarian murders in Northern Ireland or terrorists from Lybia, though the ideologies of the respective group leaders may have utterly different apparent of real justifications.

Pobis, I'd add that it's not only that certain groups of people might appear as enemies just because how the people in power operating on a group level are "set up," so to speak - or perhaps it would be more appropriate to say that the way they are set up makes them engage in "realities' constructions" that leads to the artificial creation of a powerful and dangerous enemy that threatens the social fabric. Laws are directed against this enemy, labels to describe this enemy are promulgated and disseminated via the mass media, people are divided into us and them, for us or against us.

To imbue this purported enemy with sufficient substance to render the presumed threat credible, the police or the military target groups most likely to be perceived by the general population as enemies, such as ethnic or religious minorities or political dissidents. If such groups happen to include violent insurgents or separatists at their radical fringe, so much the better, since the threat will be more easily depicted as real. But this is not always necessary in the business of constructing reality: mere change is violence to the status quo and so, in the eyes of the power holders, peaceful advocacy and non-violent dissent can be perceived—and therefore depicted to others — as violence, per se.

During the so-called 'Dirty War' in Argentina, for example, the net of subversion was drawn so wide as to include Marxism, Zionism, Freemasonry and Progressive Catholicism, as well as human rights, women's rights and peace groups. But it did not stop there: it also included ‘indirect aggression’, which embraced everything from drug and alcohol abuse, political and economic liberalism, lay education and trade union corruption, to social and sexual deviance, the media and the creative arts.

In a closed society, where the state controls most, if not all, political, social and cultural institutions, the torture reality can be so pervasive as to constitute essentially the sole reality available, except in those undergrounds that any resistance movement manages to create and sustain. This would be the case for Nazi Germany, where a virulent brand of 'eliminationist' antisemitism removed Jews from the orbit of conventional morality.